“The conspiracy against Donald Trump, in my opinion, originated with British intelligence and persons connected with the Clinton Campaign. The provocation/dangle of George Papadopoulos was the result of electronic intercepts by [British intelligence’s NSA equivalent, General Communications Headquarters] GCHQ targeting people working on the Trump campaign. The collection effort generated hundreds of highly classified ‘SIGINT’ messages that were disseminated in the U.S. intelligence community. Those messages led to the unmasking of more than 100 Americans whose names appeared in those reports. And this ‘intel’ dump from the Brits became the predicate for launching a counter intelligence investigation of Donald Trump and his campaign,” patriotic former CIA officer Larry Johnson, now active with the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), wrote on March 27, in the blog of Col. Pat Lang (ret.), “Sic Semper Tyrannis.”

Johnson gave that precise identification of the origination of the assault on the Presidency in his posting, “Time for Clapper To Go Under Oath.” The posting makes clear Johnson is not speaking as someone “out in the cold.”

“When the tale of the plot to destroy Donald Trump’s candidacy and Presidency is told, Jim Clapper will be proven as a key player in the conspiracy. Clapper was not a passive observer,” Johnson wrote.

“I am told by friends who had direct dealings with Clapper during his tenure as the Director of National Intelligence that he was helping coordinate the activities of the CIA, the NSA and the FBI in the collection and dissemination of information on Trump and his associates.”

Johnson reviews the implications of recently released texts connecting “congenital liar” Clapper and then FBI agent Peter Strzok. But Strzok is not the key player, he argues; only “an important cog in the anti-Trump conspiracy machine” who was in regular contact with Clapper. Johnson suggests that Strzok, in fact, “could be considered a dupe,” who “accepted the British intel at face value and then was reinforced in his beliefs by the lies of MI6 officer Christopher Steele.”

Clapper, however, is no dupe. “When the investigation of this mess is completed, I believe Jim Clapper will emerge as a puppet master in pulling FBI strings and putting Trump under a cloud,” Johnson wrote.

Pat Lang, for his part, suggested on his blog March 26 that prosecuting Obama’s former Director of National Intelligence might generate useful intelligence since “Jimmy Clapper would quickly cave under pressure and seek to throw someone under the bus to save himself,” if he faced possible jail time. Clapper recently claimed that “Obama told me to do it.”